Archive for November, 2012

This post first appeared on The Jew and the Carrot blog at the Forward.

“The loss is unfathomable,” said “Save The Deli” author David Sax. He was despairing over the closure of New York’s famed Stage Deli, which happened last night at midnight.

The 75-year-old Midtown landmark located just a couple of blocks from Carnegie Hall (and from its rival, the Carnegie Deli) still has its website — with tantalizing photos of overstuffed pastrami sandwiches, crunchy pickles, tangy coleslaw, and creamy cheesecakes — up, but now the food is only for looking at, not tasting. Gone are the sandwiches that gustatorily honored celebrity customers like Mel Brooks, Larry David, Katie Couric, Howie Mandel, Al Rocker, Cindy Adams and Dolly Parton.

This post was first published on the Forward Thinking blog at The Forward.

Jodi Rudoren (photo credit: Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)

My recent interview for The Forward with New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief Jodi Rudoren, while she was covering the recent conflagration between Israel and Hamas from inside Gaza, was instigated by a remark I read in one of her Facebook posts. So, obviously, I regarded Rudoren’s providing personal reflection and commentary on the situation beyond what she was writing for publication in the Times to be a positive thing.

However, others took a more negative view of these social media posts and let their opinions be known. Most notably, the blogger Philip Weiss, citing examples of Rudoren’s posts on his Mondoweiss website, took issue with how, in his view, “[Rudoren] seems culturally bound inside the Israeli experience.”

Now, we learn from NYT’s Public Editor Margaret Sullivan that in response to this “problematic” situation, the paper “is taking steps to make sure that Ms. Rudoren’s further social media efforts go more smoothly. The foreign editor, Joseph Kahn, is assigning an editor on the foreign desk in New York to work closely with Ms. Rudoren on her social media posts.”

Marlon Brando “reading” the Forverts on the set of ‘Guys & Dolls’ in 1955. (Photo credit: Phil Stern)

It all started as a gag. In the early 1950s, a Hollywood publicist named Dave Golding hired photographer Phil Stern to take still photos on the movie set of “Guys and Dolls.” Knowing that Stern read the Forverts, Golding asked him to take a picture of Marlon Brando, one of the film’s stars, for his father, Max Golding, a big movie fan who worked as the foreman of the Yiddish newspaper’s composing room. Stern took it one step further and asked the actor to pose “reading” the Forverts.

Thus began a project that would continue over the course of much of Stern’s long career in Tinseltown. The photographer captured images of many different stars holding the Forverts. Only one of Stern’s subjects was Jewish, and none could read Yiddish. But since they were all actors, they could make it look as though they could.

Unlike Stern’s many other Hollywood portraits, these black-and-white photographs have rarely been exhibited. Initially they were just sent to Max Golding, who tacked them up on the wall of the Forverts’s composing room. In 1983 the Forverts published the photos. That same year, they appeared in a show organized by the Workmen’s Circle/Arbeter Ring and held at the Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies, in Philadelphia. Now, at the Katz Snyder Gallery at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco, they are being exhibited for the first time in almost 30 years.

Click here to read more and view a slide show of some of Stern’s Forverts photos.